A short story about Internet control
Who controls the Internet?
This question is somewhat hard to answer, as there are different forms of control. More importantly, what does control mean? Being able to shut Internet off once and for all, or to charge arbitrarily high amounts of money from its users (and this happens, to some extent, in some countries)? And that’s just the bad side of control: for example, control over intelectual property is important and needed, if done right. From my point of view, control is just as necessary as our laws in the “real” world (I don’t like to use the term when referring to the world outside the Internet, but that’s a discussion for another day), as long as this control doesn’t hurt one of its most incredible features: the ability that its users have to interact with each other, and to create amazing content.
One good example covering the recently mentioned factors is the recent story involving the media company Fox and Nostalgia, a quite popular Brazilian YouTube channel which talks about cartoons, games and pop culture from the 90’s. Nostalgia was in danger of being closed due to several ContentID claims by Fox and Turner, even though the Brazilian channel’s content is actually original and constitutes fair use, judging from the length of the image and video snippets used in their videos, and from the intention behind their use. Fortunately, after a huge commotion among other YouTubers, famous Twitter users and fans, Felipe Castanhari, the main person behind the channel’s videos, managed to have a conversation with both Fox and Turner, and Turner (also known as Time Warner) removed its claims, and Fox promised to do so as well. Though this story had a happy ending, there are many other great quality channels which were shut down and weren’t able to come back, which could be an evidence that YouTube needs to rethink its ContentID system.
References:
http://www.tubefilter.com/2014/01/20/brazil-canal-nostalgia-contentid/
(Portuguese) http://www.youpix.com.br/youtube/fim-canal-nostalgia-youtube/
